Benedick with bells on: James Earl Jones on new production of Much Ado About Nothing

Why shouldn’t an 82-year-old be playing combative suitor to Vanessa Redgrave’s Beatrice in Mark Rylance’s new production of Much Ado About Nothing? Once you’ve broken the tradition of an all-white cast, all traditions can be broken, James Earl Jones tells Nick Curtis

Tuesday 13 August 2013 08:58 BST

You truly have not lived until you’ve heard James Earl Jones utter the word “Mississippi”. It’s even better when the 82-year-old actor goes on to describe his home state as “the asshole of America”.

Sitting in the Old Vic during rehearsals for Much Ado About Nothing, in which he and Vanessa Redgrave play an older-than-usual Beatrice and Benedick, Jones sounds like God should sound. He is the sonorous, instantly recognisable voice of Darth Vader and Mufasa from The Lion King, and the 2012 honorary Academy Award recognising his 50-year film career ushered him into the select group of 11 people who have won all the big four American prizes: Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, Tony.

The last, which he won for The Great White Hope in 1967, is probably most important to him, though, for he is first and foremost a stage actor. He first performed on the London stage in the Seventies in a one-man show about Paul Robeson but only recently seems to have mounted a full-scale attempt to conquer the capital. After appearing here as Big Daddy in the revelatory all-black New York production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof in 2010, he and Redgrave displayed an easy chemistry in a 2011 West End staging of Driving Miss Daisy, which they then took to New York. There, it was seen by Mark Rylance, the actor and founding director of Shakespeare’s Globe, who immediately rushed backstage.

“He didn’t comment about the play or our performances,” says Jones. “He just said, ‘I think you two should play Beatrice and Benedick’. Vanessa’s first words were: ‘Okay, if you’ll direct it’. And it was on. I was just stunned.” He agreed to it largely because of Redgrave: “I enjoy being on stage with her, and I enjoy the difference between us,” he says. “She is very probing of a role, whereas I tend to grab onto the obvious things and miss a lot of other good stuff. But here I have a director who will not allow me to do that.”

He finds himself amid a cast that is ethnically mixed and transatlantic, undergoing the rigorous “training programme” of Rylance’s rehearsals: dance lessons, singing, games to sharpen banter.

“It’s like I’m a special ops soldier dropped into an enemy stronghold,” Jones says, which might sound self-aggrandising if Jones hadn’t also been a US Ranger during the Korean War, after graduating from the University of Michigan and before starting his acting career in New York. He never saw action but his military past informs his approach to Benedick, a soldier.

“I’m playing him as a sergeant major, out of his element, among lieutenants, heiresses, the family of a governor,” he says. “He’s low class, with only a rank and a pretty good vocabulary to get him through. He’s described as ‘the prince’s jester’, which I originally thought was just a smartass comment. But he is a cousin to Lear’s Fool and to Bottom, to all the [Shakespearean] asses.”

He and Redgrave are the only ones cast outside their characters’ usual age range, though. “I guess it’s a little iconoclastic, but once the tradition of mono-ethnic casting has been broken all traditions can be broken,” he says. “It will pique people’s interest: what is age?”

It certainly adds a new dimension to the two characters’ long flirtation. Jones has said before that he resents the idea that older characters in drama tend to be sexless, or at least post-sexual. He grew up on his grandparents’ farm and had the bedroom next to theirs: “And I can tell you, from what I heard, they were making love well into their late seventies.”

Jones was born in Mississippi in 1931, of mixed African, Irish and Native American stock, his mother a teacher and maid, and his father a prizefighter turned actor, who left soon after his son’s birth. (The two men would act together years later in an Errol John play.) Segregated Mississippi was pretty bleak at that time, hence the “asshole of America” comment, but Jones describes a self-sufficient if poor existence, protected from external racism.

A paralysing stutter stopped him speaking for several years, until a teacher coaxed him into reading his own poetry. He entered the University of Michigan to study medicine (“I was frankly not bright enough”) but was drawn to theatre: he appeared in Much Ado as Verges in an off-campus production in which Leonard Nimoy’s father played Benedick. After his military service, Jones moved to New York to make it as an actor.

He was not an overnight success. For a while he worked part-time as a janitor, and at one point shared an apartment with his father to save money. His first film role was in Doctor Strangelove, in 1964, and stardom arrived with the stage and film version of Great White Hope three years later.

He has acknowledged in the past that he arrived at the right time, when the tide of civil rights was turning. But partly because of his own mixed heritage, partly because his grandmother was “the most racist, bigoted person I’ve ever known”, partly because of his father’s “inarticulate” support for Paul Robeson’s radical beliefs, and partly because of that still-problematic stutter, he’s wary of being a spokesman for any group or cause. Unlike the famously politicised Vanessa Redgrave, I say. “Exactly,” says Jones. “I sympathise with her but I don’t join her. I am totally for everything she believes in but I am not an activist.”

Professionally, he’s been more fulfilled in theatre, where he’s performed works by Athol Fugard and August Wilson, Othello and Lear, than on screen. There are highlights on his film CV — Cry, the Beloved Country, Coming to America, the various Jack Ryan films — but generally he’s one of those welcome screen presences who is good even when the material is rubbish. He’s never made “the big bucks”, earning more as the voice of the communications company Verizon than he ever has from acting. Even his work on Star Wars was classed as “special effects” and paid commensurately, but it got him out of debt at the time. He feels honoured to be associated with such a cultural phenomenon, and happily signs Darth Vader pictures for kids. “If it’s not raining,” he cautions, “and if there aren’t too many of ’em.”

He says he learned on the farm how to be content with little, and points out, amid a very erudite discussion of major dramatic characters, that “wanting” something implies that you are lacking something. He lives with his second wife, actress Cecilia Hart, and their son, Flynn Earl, who also works as his assistant, on a spacious property in leafy, upstate New York rather than in LA.

“Los Angeles is a great place to work but most actors are usually out of work,” he says. “In New York you can tell somebody you need a job: in Los Angeles you’d let your fridge go bare, you’d let your Mercedes run out of gas, before you’d admit you need money.”

While in London, he wants to see A Season in the Congo at the Young Vic, Lenny Henry as Troy in August Wilson’s Fences (Jones won his second Tony when he originated the role, and he and Henry are friends) and Adrian Lester’s Othello (Lester played Brick to his Big Daddy in London).

“Otherwise, I am involved with the city only in terms of where I sleep and eat and work, and the doctors I go to, out of necessity,” he admits. He is a little hard of hearing and years of smoking have left him dependent on inhalers, but he has a clean bill of health to perform. “My wife is the one who engages with London,” he continues. “She has very small feet but they have travelled every inch of this city. She will go to every gallery there is and she goes back every time to see the Elgin Marbles.”

The two met on the TV series Paris in 1979 and have been married for 31 years. What’s the secret, I ask? “I married a woman who was a Gemini,” he says, straight-faced. “Two wonderful babes! So when one goes flat I got the other one.” Not for the first time in a thoroughly delightful interview, I can’t believe what the voice of God has just said to me.